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rbrandis writes "The general manager of Microsoft's Windows digital media division David Fester has suggested that iTunes' emerging dominance would be bad for consumers, because it would limit them to the iPod, as opposed to limiting them to Microsoft based products. In a moment of what must have been an attempt at ironic humor he said, 'Windows is about choice - you can mix and match software and music player stuff. We believe you should have the same choice when it comes to music services.'"

iTunes doesn't require you to have an iPod. It works fine on your computer. And it's the only solution that allows you to take the files you buy from it, unprotect them, and turn them into whatever format you want.

I know, you'll call me an Apple apologist. Whatever. I guess I could call you a Microsoft apologist and it would make as much sense.

Don't iPods already work with Windows?:) I don't think they are that picky about which hardware is running the OS. So, I'm sure they do work with "HP Windows boxen" (when did that become plural for boxes?). In addition, there are several ways to get iPods to interoperate with Linux [google.com].

My God... YES. The Windows version of the iPod has been out for ages. Since the first generation, in fact. It used to work with MusicMatch, now it runs on iTunes for Windows. There are even a few Linux tools [gnu.org] to work it already. Hell, it can even RUN Linux [sourceforge.net] if you want.

Not compeletely. You can only listen to iTunes Music Store protected AAC files on iPods, Windows computers and Macintosh computers.

iTunes itself allows you to create unprotected MP3 and unprotected AAC from your own music collection and do whatever you want with them.

I do not believe Microsoft's Windows Media Player for the Mac allows listening to protected WMA files, so in that regard the WMA format is more locked in than AAC (currently).

Also if you look at Buy.com's music store you'll see that instead of Apple's flat and mild DRM policy (same policy all songs), music company's can restrict you to how often you can copy music to your player and how many times you can play a song and if you can burn it to CD (the ability to do this may be in AAC files, i'm not sure, but it has not been enabled)

so no, currently the itunes is not as restrictive as Windows Media Player, but the protected AAC's can only be played on iPod players (if Apple gains a large enough share of the online music world -- say 90%, there may be an anti-trust law suit against them for not allowing the songs to be played on non-Apple devices)

Have you ever tried MS Media player on the Apple? It pretty much sucks.

Correction: It is probably the suckiest app on the Mac. You can't even drop a movie on its icon, fer' Chris'sakes! So you do the song and dance with "File -> Open" just to get a dialog that says "Windows (snort!) Media Player has unexpectedly quit."

I hate to point out the obvious, but I use iTunes and I do not have an iPod and I'm sitting in my living room enjoying beautiful music off my stereo that I got from iTunes. All I have to do is burn a disk. La dee dah. One of the biggest misconceptions is that one needs an iPod to use iTunes. Tain't so.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you can only listen to iTunes content on an iPod.

OK, Let's see if I can clear this up for you.

iTunes can handle several different audio codecs. Most of my files are MP3s, but some are AIFFs and some are AAC. That being said, I can sync and listen to ALL my MP3s and AIFF files on ANY player that can understand them. You don't need an iPod to listen to MP3s from iTunes - almost any MP3 player will do.

iTunes Music Store on the other hand only provides AAC encoded content. You must have a device capable of playing AAC files to play this content - or, you can make a playlist, hit "burn" (you don't even need a CD - there is software that can make a "virtual" CD") and you now have all your purchased content in 128 Bit MP3 format. Yes, one extra step, but easy to do and it's then DRM-Free. I do this so that I can play my purchased music on my MP3-enabled CD player in the car or in my office at work.
So the long and short of it is, iTunes content isn't only AAC DRM'd Files.

Hope that clears it up. Don't listen to the FUD put out by those who seem to feel threatened by it. iTunes is an excellent player/organizer in it's own right and doesn't need an iPod to work.

Except that, Apple gives you the free iMovie App and allows you to save in DV and any quicktime supported codec (including DIVX if you install the plug-in) etc. So, yeah, I'm going to gripe about substandard "free" software from Microsoft.

I never said you were required to use AAC on an ipod. However, if you want to use your purchased music from apple you can (as of righ tnow) play it on exactly 1 portable device, the ipod. WMA's can be played on virutally any major mp3 player (except the ipod).

Note: those other devices you listed, while they can play AAC's, cannot -- I'm 99% sure -- play the DRM aac's that apple sells through iTunes.

iTunes will upload and download songs from many MP3 players, including these [apple.com].

The only limitation is that you cannot play AAC protected (iTunes music store) files on these third-party players. But a quick capture/rip (or just use Audio Hijack to capture the stream to MP3) takes care of that limitation.

This compatibilty only relates to using MP3's that you rip yourself,from itunes on different devices .
The OP was saying that if you want to use the AAC files from the Itunes Music Store you have to use an ipod, unless you use one of the previously mentioned methods for copying to cd and then re-ripping to MP3

"MPEG-4 AAC has been specified as the high-quality general audio coder for 3G wireless terminals. Apple Computer has incorporated MPEG-4 AAC into QuickTime 6 and iTunes 4, as well as the latest version of its award-winning iPod portable music player. The Digital Radio Mondiale system (the next-generation digital replacement for radio broadcasting under 30 MHZ) builds on the audio coding of MPEG-4 AAC."http://www.vialicensing.com/products/mpeg4aac/stan dard.html [vialicensing.com]

How is Quicktime part of this discussion? Apple's iTMS is in AAC format. The iPod supports AAC, MP3, Audible, AIFF, and WAV except WMA.

Actually Apple's iTMS music is in MPEG-4 format, which is virtually identical to the Quicktime container format. The MPEG-4 format was adopted from the Quicktime format. The music in the container format is AAC which has been encrypted by FairPlay, a DRM encryption scheme.

If you look at the files you download from iTMS they have the file extension ".m4p" which stands for MPEG-4 Protected. Tunes that you encode yourself using iTunes AAC are given the extension ".m4a" which stands for MPEG-4 Audio.

The iPod supports both MPEG-4 Protected and MPEG-4 Audio. Both formats use AAC to encode the audio signal. iPods also can play MP3, Audible, AIFF, and WAV.

Easy - Apple doesn't own the copyright to the music and the record companies won't let Apple sell the music unless some form of rights management is in place. If they were allowed to do so, I'm sure they would have preferred to sell raw AAC files without any rights management.

I think its cool that Apple managed to get the record companies to agree on a system as liberal as iTMS. You can burn an *unlimited* number of *unprotected audio CDs* with the only restriction that a particular *playlist* can be burned a maximum of 10 times. (Not a big deal, just make a new playlist with the same songs or, for that matter, just make a copy of the *unprotected audio CD* you already burned 10 copies of!)

You can authorize 3 computers to play the protected files directly and you can backup the protected files to any type of media you like. You can play the protected files on as many iPods as you want, etc...

So why can't portable music players be able to play more than one form of digital music? Is it so impossible to have a player that can play both WMA and AAC? Why? Is it possible for companies to make a player that not only can play multiple audio formats but also have the ability to add a codec so you can play additional ones? That's something I'd like to see... by a player... and play any format...

The iPod, and I'm sure many other portable players(though I've not researched any) are capable of playing other formats other than either AAC or WMA. The problem we encounter here is that WMA is a *proprietary* Microsoft format. AAC is just another MPEG standard which anyone can license.

Also, for your info the iPod is able to play MP3, AAC, Protected AAC, Audible, AIFF, and WAV. The one it lacks is the proprietary WMA. The only "lock-in" would be the WMA format.

Well, technically speaking, now you can play m4p on two different MP3 players: the first three generations of the original iPod and now on the five colors of iPod mini. And, later in the year, on the HP iPod.

Its not like the iPod is some niche player - the installed base is large enough that there are many 3rd party iPod accessories out there. (Be it Monster Cables to connecto to a stereo, neoprene "skins" or battery replacements!)

I was rather impressed that Alpine will offer a cable to connect iPod to the car stereo. One cable for power + audio + data, giving full control of the iPod from the in dash head unit.

You had me until you got to "Windows Media for iPod." Apple has NO plans to do this, and indeed it would be completely insane to do it. AAC sounds better, is open, and doesn't carry the restrictive licensing requirements that attach to WMA.

Apple has been developing quicktime for years...It was one of the first multimedia codex available for PC...until MS wanted to "share" [their rules of course] Now apple has a shot at getting quicktime back into the mainstream with just a touch of MS style bundling. You buy the iPod and install the FULL Quicktime program! including the animation and movie formats...three of the things MS has been trying to break since apple was gullible enough to ever talk to them. iPod and even moreso iTMS is a total coup for Apple in 10+ years of playing second fidddle to MS! It's a codex coup almost worth of MS in it's execution. But hey, turnabout is fair play!!!

yes but apple's fair play DRM is ONLY AVAILABLE through apple. you can ONLY LICENSE it through apple. YOU CANNOT PLAY APPLE AAC's BOUGHT THROUGH APPLE'S ITUNES MUSIC STORE ON ANYTHING ELSE BUT APPLE PRODUCTS. Why? Because it uses a proprietary DRM format.

MP3, AAC, Ogg, WMA and most (but not all) CODECs are 'lossy'. So, if you take a raw bit stream and encode it with ACC, you lose some quality. Not very much.

To play this back, you need to convert it back to raw bits again. Now, you can capture those bits (Audio Hijack does this), and save the file, but it will be huge. (You encoded using MP3 etc becuase you wanted to save space).

If you reencode this with any lossy CODEC, including the 'original', you will lose some more information. Probably enough that you will notice that the quality has degraded.

So, the DRM in AAC stops you making unlimited copies of the original file. (Well, you can copy them, but they will only play on a limited number of machines---keyed to the embedded DRM info.) You can of course burn the tracks to CD---which copies the raw bitstream. You can make an unlimited number of copies of this (though iTunes won't let you make more than 10 copoies of a playlist, but that is mere inconvenience). You can also re-encode using another DRM free CODEC, but if that CODEC is lossy, the quality will be degraded. Probably noticeably.

Note again though: any time you reencode between lossy CODECs, you will lose some quality. This has nothing to do with DRM.

In conclusion, you are right. A copy is going to be lossy, except if you burn to CD (which is easy).

Somewhat tangential, but pertaining to the IE parallel: Apple did choose to follow Microsoft's lead with Internet Explorer, with Safari/Mail.app in 10.3 (Panther). while you can delete iTunes, and have no problems with playing music, if you opt to delete either Mail or Safari, it becomes impossible to change your Mail or Internet settings afterwards. I'm still quite irritated with Apple for choosing to remove the Internet PrefPane, and wish more people would e-mail Apple about this. Hopefully with enough negative commentary on this decision, this PrefPane would return.

Again, Fairplay isn't a property of Apple but of Veridisc. I don't see why any other company wouldn't be able to licence Fairplay from Veridisc, AAC from the MPEG alliance, and make its products able to read files bought on the iTunes Music Store.

given what was done to the technologies that Compaq pioneered since they were bought by HP

Sorry pal, the most notable engineering effort by Compaq was marketing.

Compaq essentially was a marketing organization and box assembler, which made too much money and bought a couple of enterprise computer companies (in hopes to get a foothold into their customer base).

Digital Equipment [wikipedia.org] (or DEC as we preferred to refer to it) on the other hand was an engineering company (which was later part of its downfall) and the technologies you are referring too where hatched at DEC.

Notable engineering efforts where (leaving away very ancient history) the Alpha AXP chip (which introduced 64bit processing 10 years before Intel could even come up with a workable prototype and Itanium "steels" a lot from alpha), or clustering, which worked seemlessly and transparently in 1988 (probably before that), while other "clustering" technologies, most notably under HP/UX, seem to be a bunch of hacked together scripts, which provide a never ending nightmare (specifically after major migrations). I could continue with some of the best compilers and a development environment, which would still put a lot of modern stuff to shame.

Compaq had no fucking clue what they where getting and they where even more clueless in the realm of enterprise customers relying on rock solid, mission critical iron. Uptimes for such customers (for example the Amsterdam coppers [linuxsa.org.au]) is measured in thousands of days and they tend to take a dim view on the infamous CTRL-ALT-DELETE "error correction" procedure.

The entire rail industry in the 19th century was essentially privately funded.

Not true. Actually, the rise of the rail industry in the gilded age (1866-1901) is an excellent example of the weird mixture of private monopoly and state intervention, unfortunately typical for American capitalism. If there is a large project - such as "we need railroads to connect our cities" or "we need broadcaster to provide us television" or "we need weapons to combat communism", it is indeed given to private hands. But since it is so important, private enterprises receive substantial state aid (such as advances in government bonds) and become strong enough to influence politics by financing the politicians back. That's how the famous military-industrial complex works (and just because you heard this name in some Oliver Stone movie, it does not mean it doesn't exist).

For example, Tom Scott, a typical railorad tycoon, had a deal with the Republican presidential candidate Rutherford Hayes - "I will help you win the 1876 election, you will subsidize my Texas and Pacific lines when you'll get the office". Scott has helped, Hayes has won, railroad was subsidized. Government also kindly provided troops to break the railroad strikes of 1877.

>QT is MacOS's audio/video API. You can drag the>QT player to the trash just fine, but deleting QT would>be a bit like deleting DirectShow.

Sorry, you're free to delete Quicktime.framework if you see fit. It is located at/System/Library/Frameworks/Quicktime.framework . Also, Mplayer OS X and Microsoft Windows Media Player works just fine on all Mac OS X boxs without using any Quicktime libraries at all.

WMP9 for OS X doesn't support the DRM used by the music stores. Haven't you paid attention this entire thread to the distinction made between AAC and AAC + Fairplay? The same distinction is made between WMA and WMA + DRM.

And none of the music stores will let you buy their music from an OS X machine. ITMS has two major platforms supported for purchasing.

Ever hear of CD-RW's? That's how I try DVD masters before I write them to DVD-R's permanently.

Also, there are programs like Nero and Alchohol that allow you to create a "virtual" CD/DVD formatted disc in RAM and you just write/read to that virtual drive. It looks just like a real CD-R to your software, but no wasted disc, and it read/writes MUCH faster than an actual CD/DVD-R.

Over the past year I've switched from one format to the other, always investigating claims that one codec was better than the next. I did my own comparison tests between MP3,OGG,WMA and later AAC. The one that impressed me the most from a quality perspective was aac, while I desired the "openness" of ogg. Yes, I realise AAC is not an Apple proprietary format (though their DRM encoded files are). I wanted very much to like OGG, and gave it every opportunity to impress me. To my ears however it just sounded "flat" (regardless of bitrate) and I couldn't convince myself otherwise, no matter how I tried.

When iTunes for Windows was released I immediately started encoding to AAC. I loved it. AAC at 160kbps sounded fantastic with a lot of detail and range. It had that "full" sound that I thought was lacking in OGG. What I didn't like was the lack of encoding settings iTunes provided. Not a big deal really - as it did sound very good. But it hit me that (at the time) if I wanted to play AAC outside of iTunes, I'd need a plugin for Winamp (no longer req'd). What if I wanted to play these files off my dvd player or other multi-format device? I'm sure AAC is here to stay, but I wanted to be able to play my music on devices other than just my PC. For portabiltiy I have an external USB 2 hard disk.

I then thought it best to give MP3 another chance. I searched and eventually found www.jthz.com/mp3/ [jthz.com] Using this site as a resource, I managed to encode high quality VBR MP3s which use slightly less space than comperably encoded AACs and sound every bit as good. It's a shame how MP3 has received some hard knocks lately as everyone rushes to the latest codec of the month. I'm convinced that the only reason these other codecs exist (aside from OGG) is not for quality reasons whatsoever. They're here because they allow better DRM - that's it! Now if people would spend the time and learn to encode their MP3s properly rather than accepting the defaults (typically 128kbps) of whatever all-in-one app they happen to be using, perhaps these "superior" formats wouldn't be getting as much positive press.

Worse from the standpoint of having two layers of obfuscation to deal withm during conversion. If all you have to do is rip the DRM, then it's one less step in achieiving your goal, an unencumbered file in a standardized format.